Important Update: Changes to Email Sending Policy for Your VIP Applications

As part of our ongoing commitment to maintaining robust and secure email-sending practices, we want to communicate an important policy update that will affect how your applications send emails.

New Requirement: Domain Mapping and Verification 

To ensure the integrity and deliverability of emails sent from applications hosted on WordPress VIP, it is now mandatory for all sending domains to be verified and mapped through the VIP Dashboard. A domain must be mapped to the environment from which the emails are sent. Mails sent from unmapped and unverified domains will soon be rejected. 

For detailed guidance on mapping and verifying your domains, please visit: https://docs.wpvip.com/domains/verification/

Requirement: Domain SPF, DKIM, and DMARC DNS Configuration

As explained in previous communications (listed below), the primary changes required for email deliverability are the configuration of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC DNS records for each mapped & verified domain being used to send emails on VIP.

Phasing out: Header Rewrites

Up to now, for emails sent from your VIP environments using unmapped domains, we  have been rewriting the “FROM” header to `donotreply@wpvip.com` as a temporary measure. This was intended to provide some leeway while transitioning to the new requirements. However, to align with best practices and improve service standards, this will be phased out according to the following schedule:

  • Starting March 5 2024: Email sent from non-production VIP servers with unmapped domains  will be rejected.
  • Starting April 1 2024: We will extend this policy for all production environments, rejecting all email from domains that are not correctly mapped to VIP.

Action Required

To avoid disruption to your outgoing email, please ensure that you complete domain mapping and verification , as well as any required DNS security changes before the above-stated deadlines. 

Support and Questions

We understand that this policy update may require you to make specific changes to your current setup. Our team is fully prepared to assist you with a smooth transition. If you have any questions or need support, please feel free to open a support ticket, and we will be happy to help.

New Relic Management in the VIP Dashboard

We’re excited to announce an enhancement to our VIP Dashboard: Management capabilities of your applications APM from New Relic. This integration simplifies managing New Relic APM for both production and non-production environments, offering a seamless experience in monitoring and optimizing your application’s performance.

New Features at Your Fingertips

  • Easy Activation: Activate New Relic APM for your Production and Non-Production environments directly from the VIP Dashboard.
  • User Access Management: Effortlessly manage who has access to New Relic tools within your team.
  • Flexible Testing in Non-Production: Enable New Relic for continuous 7-day periods in non-production environments, perfect for thorough testing and analysis.
  • Uninterrupted Monitoring in Production: In Production environments, New Relic can be either permanently on or off, offering consistent monitoring without time constraints.

What to Expect

Upon activation, a New Relic entity is created for your application, and New Relic begins sampling HTTP requests. Please note, this may have a minimal impact on application performance, but the insights gained are invaluable for optimizing your user experience.

Ready to Enhance Your New Relic experience?

Get started by navigating to the New Relic section, located under “Performance” in your VIP Dashboard. For more detailed information, please check our documentation. If you’re activating New Relic for your Node.JS application please see our documentation for more advice on how to start reporting data from your application. 

Questions or Need Support?

If you have any questions or require assistance, our support team is always ready to help. Open a support ticket, and we’ll ensure your experience with New Relic APM is smooth and beneficial.

Announcing Enhanced Database Access with phpMyAdmin

Great news: We’re enhancing your database management capabilities by introducing read access to phpMyAdmin for all your environments. This user-friendly frontend tool will provide convenient read-only access to your database. 

Getting Started

To get access to phpMyAdmin you need to make sure to update your VIP-CLI to the latest version by running the following command:

npm install -g @automattic/vip

Once you’re at least on version 2.38.0 or higher you can simply run the following command:

vip db phpmyadmin @APPID.Environment

Check out our documentation for instructions on accessing and using phpMyAdmin through the VIP-CLI.

The introduction read-only access to your database through phpMyAdmin marks a pivotal moment in our continuous effort to provide advanced tools and features that cater to the evolving needs of our customers. It embodies our commitment to enhancing the development experience, offering a sophisticated yet user-friendly platform for efficient database management.

Need Help or Have Questions?

If you encounter any issues or have questions about using phpMyAdmin, our support team is here to assist. Please open a support ticket, and we’ll help ensure a smooth experience.

Cloud development environments with GitHub Codespaces

We’re excited to announce our cloud development environment implementation, based on GitHub Codespaces. This new type of development environment allows our customers to move faster and integrate their work directly with their code repositories.

This implementation will empower you to start developing immediately, without having to install and configure any software on your computer. Code from any device, you don’t even have to have a computer to develop.

GitHub Codespaces is a powerful feature that allows users to spin up development environments in the cloud in mere minutes.

Codespaces unlocks exciting possibilities like quickly sharing the results of your work with other members of the team or stakeholders and even pair programming (utilizing LiveShare). It’s much easier to share a link to your codespace than recording a demo or having a call to run a live demonstration.

Codespaces can be run in-browser or within select IDEs like Visual Studio Code and Jetbrains IDEs.

What’s included?

WordPress VIP implementation with GitHub Codespaces is packed with all the features you can find in the VIP Local Development Environment including XDebug, Mailpit, Photon, phpMyAdmin, Elasticsearch, and Cron. We provided conservative default values, many of these optional services are disabled by default, the configuration can be tweaked in features key of ‘devcontainer.json’.

Tooling like WP-CLI, latest LTS version of Node.js, and latest VIP-CLI is preinstalled for your convenience.

We’ve designed it in a way to be extensible so you can add your own features (including privately published ones), further tailoring your cloud development workflow to your needs.

Who’s it for?

We don’t intend this tool to be a replacement for VIP Local Development Environments, both products will receive the same level of support. Each has their own primary use-cases.

Using the VIP Local Development Environment would be preferred in the following scenarios:

  • The lack of a steady internet connection.
  • Running an Elasticsearch instance. It’s very resource intensive and requires at least 4 cores in Codespaces.
  • Have company policies preventing you from having the data on third-party services (in this case, GitHub.) 

Using codespaces will help with the following cases:

  • Inability to install or run Docker and Node.js. For example, for compliance and security reasons some companies disallow installing Docker. This is not an issue when using Codespaces since you’re not installing anything at all.
  • Quick access to work-in-progress features. All it takes is setting the visibility of the codespace to `public` and sharing a public link.
  • LiveShare makes it extremely easy to participate in pair programming sessions.

Find out more about our support on GitHub Codespaces in the documentation.

Use of Codespaces within the ‘wpcomvip’ GitHub organization is available as a part of our Enhanced and Premier packages. Please open a support ticket and our team will get you set up.

To work with Codespaces outside of the wpcomvip organization, customers can copy the .devcontainer/devcontainer.json file to their own GitHub repository. Each user gets up to 180 hours of compute free. Please refer to the Codespaces billing page for more details.

Email Delivery Changes on VIP

Following our earlier communication this month, we’re taking additional steps to fortify the reliability and security of email delivery from the VIP platform. This initiative underscores our commitment to providing a stable and trustworthy platform for all our users.

Key Updates

  • Mandatory Email Authentication Records: For domains mapped to VIP application environments, SPF, DMARC, and DKIM records are required. Email messages originating from domains that are mapped to VIP application environments but that do not have valid DKIM records will not be signed by our SMTP servers after 1 February 2024. 
  • Policy for Unmapped Domains: Emails from domains not mapped to VIP app environments will face a stricter policy. Starting in March 2024, our SMTP servers will reject such emails. However, to ease this transition, we’re implementing a one-month grace period.
    During this time, emails from unmapped domains won’t be blocked outright but will have their headers rewritten to be sent from donotreply@wpvip.com.

Action Required

  • Verify and Update Domains: Before an application can send email using  WordPress VIP mail servers, its domain name must be mapped to VIP. Please verify that the domain is listed on the Domains & TLS page in the VIP Dashboard. Soon, emails sent from unmapped domains will be rejected.
  • DNS Setting Updates: As mentioned in our previous post, please ensure that your domains include the DNS records specified. This update is crucial to maintain uninterrupted email services.

We appreciate your prompt attention to these changes. Our goal is to ensure a seamless transition and continued excellence in service delivery.

If you have further questions about this change or how it affects your domains, you can open a ticket with VIP Support.

Better control around your deployment branches

We’re happy to unveil a significant advancement in code management: the Repository Management feature inside the VIP Dashboard. This new tool will accelerate your development and testing workflows by giving you the autonomy to take instant actions around your environments. 

Repository Management allows you to modify the branches from which we deploy your environments, offering a tailored and flexible approach to your project’s needs, without the need to go through our support. We’ve empowered you to take decisive action, toggle it yourself, and keep on deploying cool things. 

How to Get Started

To start using Repository Management, simply access the VIP Dashboard, go to Code, and select ‘Repository Management’. From there, you can choose your preferred deployment branch. For detailed instructions, please refer to our Repository Management Documentation.

Need Assistance?

As always, we’re here to help. If you have any questions or need support with Repository Management, please open a support ticket, and our team will be glad to assist you.

Action Required: Changes in Email Deliveries

Both Google and Yahoo are making some changes for deliverability to their services starting from Feb 1, 2024, and WordPress VIP will be updating our infrastructure to account for these changes. Customers who use custom domains to send emails from WordPress will need to act and add DNS records mentioned below. If you only use the default email address, donotreply@wpvip.com, no action is necessary.

Required Changes 

If you use a custom domain to send email, you’ll need to add SPF and DKIM records and, if you’re sending more than 5,000 emails per day, a DMARC record into your DNS settings. 

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

For the SPF Record, you need to add the following string to your existing SPF Record:

include:_spf.wpvip.com

Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM)  

For the DKIM Record, you to add the following CNAME records to your DNS Settings:

wpvip1._domainkey.<domain> CNAME wpvip1._domainkey.wpvip.com
wpvip2._domainkey.<domain> CNAME wpvip2._domainkey.wpvip.com

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC)

For DMARC, which is required if you are sending more than 5,000 emails per day, the minimum entry would need to be:

_dmarc.<domain>

with TXT value of 

v=DMARC1; p=none; 

Notice

VIP’s infrastructure is not intended for the distribution of bulk HTML emails, mailing list functionality, invitations to view or share content, notifications of site activity, or other mass-email functionality. 

We kindly ask you to use an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) service or ESP (Email Service Provider) to send such emails. More Information on how to set this up can be found in our documentation: https://docs.wpvip.com/technical-references/email-on-vip/ 

What happens after 1st of February

Please make sure to set the required DNS entries for your domains to make sure your emails are still delivered. Without these updates, your emails risk being undelivered or marked as spam, leading to potential communication disruptions and harm to your domain’s credibility. Prompt action is advised to uphold the reliability and effectiveness of your email communications.

If you have any questions related to this, please open a support ticket, and we will be happy to assist.

Feature Announcement: Deployments Rollbacks

As a developer, dealing with the unexpected is one of the most challenging aspects of managing an application. Knowing you can quickly rollback to known-good code when something goes wrong in your application can be a lifesaver, and that’s why we’re thrilled to offer deployment rollbacks to you.

Screenshot from VIP Dashboards confirmation screen for deployment rollbacks

Our rollback feature lets you quickly and easily revert to a previous deployment. The VIP Platform retains images for the last six deployments of your production environments and the last three deployments of non-production environments. If you encounter any unexpected issues with a recent deployment, you can immediately roll back to a stable version of your application and minimize any disruption to your business.

Note: this feature only allows you to roll back code changes and not the database, which can be rolled back separately. Find out more in our documentation.

We understand the importance of uptime and stability for our users, and this feature is just one of the many ways we are working to ensure our platform meets your needs.

We are excited to hear your feedback on this new feature and encourage you to try it out. As always, we are committed to delivering the best possible experience for our users, and this feature is just one of the many ways we’re working towards that goal. Stay tuned for future updates that help streamline your development workflows.

Feature Update: Multisite Support for VIP-CLI Dev Environment Sync

We’re thrilled to announce that we have expanded our VIP-CLI dev-env sync sql command to include support for WordPress Multisites. This new feature is a significant step forward in our ongoing efforts to enhance the developer experience and streamline your workflow.

Multisite Support

With this update, the vip dev-env sync sql command now supports multisite installations. This means you can now import database backups for multisite environments into your local development environment with the same ease and efficiency as single site installations.

Sync Command for Multisite

To import a database backup into your local multisite environment, use the following command:

vip dev-env sync sql --slug=<your-local-env-slug> @<your-site-id>.<environment-name>

This command will import the database backup into your local multisite environment.

Please note that this command will work with the latest backup of the entire multisite network. We are continuously working to add more features and improve these commands.

To use these new features, please ensure that you’re on the latest version of VIP-CLI. Run npm install -g @automattic/vip to get the latest version. Also, verify that your VIP-CLI installation is on version 2.31.0 or above, by running vip --version from the terminal.

We’re excited to hear your feedback on these new features. How do you plan to use them? What improvements would you like to see? Feel free to get in touch!

Upcoming: VaultPress Deprecation

Over the next few months, we will be deprecating and then removing VaultPress from the WordPress VIP platform. The VIP Dashboard now supports exporting database backups for all your applications and environments, the primary feature previously provided by VaultPress.

Here’s the timeline for the planned deprecation and removal:

  • Tuesday, March 14th, 2023: VaultPress will be disabled on non-production environments
  • Tuesday, March 28th, 2023: VaultPress will be disabled on production environments
  • Tuesday, July 04th, 2023: VaultPress plugin code will be removed from the VIP Platform’s Must Use (“MU”) plugins and the VIP Platform

Once VaultPress is disabled for an environment, you won’t be able to access database backups from the VaultPress Dashboard. Instead, the VIP Dashboard will provide you an integrated experience for managing exports that fits in with your existing VIP workflows. 

If you’d like to continue leveraging VaultPress until the final removal date in June, you can add the following line to your vip-config.php file:

define( 'VIP_VAULTPRESS_SKIP_LOAD', false );

With this in place, VaultPress will continue working on your environments even after we deprecate it on non-production and production environments. It will continue working until its removal date at the end of June.

Managing exports within the VIP Dashboard

We’re excited to have these and more new features coming soon to WordPress VIP.

  • Database exports are optimized for use in development environments and allow for further customization and filtering.
  • Security is enhanced by including user access control for backups under the VIP Dashboard user management system, easing onboarding and offboarding workload.
  • Tracking generation and download events are available in the Audit Log.
  • Backup exports via VIP-CLI (upcoming feature)
  • Easier syncing of data into the VIP Local Development Environment (upcoming feature)
  • On-demand / ad-hoc backups (upcoming feature)

Please reach out to VIP Support with any questions or concerns you may have. We are happy to accommodate an extension should you need it.